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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27162085">The Mare's Tail</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/unremarkable_house/pseuds/unremarkable_house'>unremarkable_house</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Better Call Saul (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Pre-Canon, Red Cloud</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 00:14:04</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,122</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27162085</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/unremarkable_house/pseuds/unremarkable_house</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>A story about Kim Wexler</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Mare's Tail</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
<i>To successfully weed a garden, you must pull the whole plant up by the roots. Grab the offending forb firmly at the base and pull the whole thing out. If you get only the leaves, the plant might still have enough energy to grow back, and then you haven’t really done the job at all, have you? Yes, roots and all, leave the soil bare. And then the garden can flourish, without weeds outcompeting the precious flowers that require such special treatment; freed from the interlopers that suck nutrients from the earth, blot out the light, twist and twine and grab and choke until Grandma’s deliberate garden is reclaimed by the prairie -- marestail and aster, bindweed and thick clumps of grass that leave the earth cratered with their reluctance to surrender.</i>
</p><p>---</p><p>As a child, Kim Wexler pulled weeds for her grandmother for pocket change. The deal was five cents a weed, carefully counted at the end of each session, the miserly amount doled out from Gram’s nicotine-stained fingers even though she knew the only reason Kim had to weed in the first place was because Mom never had enough money in her purse for lunch. </p><p>Gram liked her garden neat, a hard line in the dirt that said <i>Flowers, here. Weeds, there</i>. A sharp contrast to the absolute hellhole inside: twenty years of refuse and ash haphazardly piled above Kim’s head with only a labyrinthian footpath for passage. Inside, the ancient air conditioners buzzed loudly in every room, drowning out the browbeating winds of the central plains, the incessant whine of crickets and cicadas, the discomforting skitter of mice and roaches that pissed and shit their way through Gram’s museum of excess. </p><p>Kim hated everything about Gram’s house, her cloister of disorder. She hated when she had to live there between evictions -- daughter and granddaughter excavating a miserable spot for themselves amidst the junk while daughter waited for mother to feel like parenting again. While daughter waited for father to come home again. And if she wasn’t inside, she was outside, the scorching summer sun on her back as she pulled out weed after weed.</p><p>Weed after weed after weed, a captive audience to Gram’s show of rolling her oxygen machine onto the front porch and giving careless handouts to all of her mother’s cousins who pulled up to the edge of the hardscrabble in their mufflerless beaters with their palms outstretched. Being unemployed and needing beer money consistently trumped being a nine-year-old in shoes that pinched. </p><p><i>Flowers go here</i>, Gram said, opening her wallet without restraint to her other children and grandchildren. <i>Weeds go there</i>, she said, handing Kim a bucket.</p><p>Apparently, since she had the misfortune to be born a Wexler and they did not, young Kimberly was obliged to learn a few lessons about hard work and sacrifice on behalf of the deadbeat side of her family, punished secondhand for Mom’s decision to fornicate with a true-blue Red Cloud scoundrel. But kneeling down in the dirt next to Gram’s doublewide, it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between undeserving gutterpups like herself and righteous citizens like her cousins with their bootless, gummy fingers in Gram’s piggy bank. </p><p>Same blonde hair, same blue eyes -- different name, different expectations. </p><p>So Kim Wexler came to have a hatred for idleness. </p><p>With that distaste, she obediently ripped plants out of the earth for cash on the side of the road in Red Cloud, Nebraska, whenever she could, while the insouciant people of her too-small town passed her by on their way out of dodge, kicking dust in her face, forever leaving her behind. </p><p>The cars and the birds and the clouds, migrating through and over her spartan life, going places she couldn’t, even if she wanted to, even if she just picked herself up off the ground and walked out of town on her own two feet. North, maybe, to Hastings, where she could catch a bus to Omaha and start over like a scrappy stray cat, a tough ragamuffin with only her wits to rely on. </p><p>At five cents a weed, thirty weeds a day, three days a week, she thought she could have sixty dollars for a bus ticket in just one summer. </p><p>Not counting, of course, the portion of that wage she used for food and books and other necessities. Not considering, of course, that the more efficiently she weeded, the less she was actually able to earn. When winter came, her coin purse offered nothing but dust. It would never be enough. And so she came to have a hatred for hungering. </p><p>All year-round, the winds would tear through Red Cloud, driving brickly scud through the too-big sky, slamming doors and making the window panes shudder in their frames. Skeletal cottonwoods and willows thrashed relentlessly, an invisible freight train that was always approaching but never arriving, undulating the endless grass -- violent ripples that went on forever. </p><p><i>Like the ocean</i>, her mom loved to say, even though Kim knew full well that she had never been to the sea. By age ten, neither had Kim, but to her, the tall, brittle grass heaving under thepressure of the wind gave the impression of being trapped on a deserted island, the world stretching beyond her without end. </p><p>But she could stand at the train station of the wind all she wanted. Could listen to her father's tinny voice down some far away wire making empty promises about earning enough money to come home. Noone was ever coming to take her away. And so the hunger grew.</p><p>---</p><p>Throughout her childhood, Kim lived between two worlds in which she didn’t belong. Fraught though her home life was, she suffered similarly crushing losses at school. It didn’t matter that she got good grades, behaved tolerably, or kept her appearance neat. Her teachers had all, at one point or another, been crossed by a Wexler. Her peers could not look past the perpetual unease and bone-weariness that came from not knowing if there was going to be a roof over her head that night or if there would be food in the house or what dickhead boyfriend-of-the-week was going to be “crashing” for the foreseeable future. </p><p>And Kim could not look past her peers and how simple it all seemed for them. What was it about them that kept their parents together? Why did their moms spend the evening fixing dinner and packing lunches instead of drinking their savings away at the bar? What made their dads come home with the fortune they sought?</p><p>The other kids in her grade laughed and worried only about childish things, drank their little milks, played their little games. Kim did not have that luxury. They teased her for her thousand-yard stare. They called her “Grim” Wexler. They elbowed her aside when she had to pause in the lunchline to count her change and Kim Wexler came to have a hatred for being unprepared. </p><p>Like the first time they got evicted. Before Mom got a knack for timing and after Dad got that gig hauling logs on the west coast and wasn’t around to swoop in to save the day. She had cried on the front lawn, in front of her mother piling overstuffed trash bags full of her stuff into the back of the station wagon, the landlord and his fistful of eviction papers, the Sheriff who stood stonily by with his hand on his pistol, and all the neighbors rubbernecking with their unabashed looks of relief that this duo of defaulters was finally getting the message that they didn’t belong here -- some amorphous, territorial <i>here</i> -- while Kim cried the doleful tears of a seven-year-old yanked up by the roots. </p><p><i>Flowers: here</i>, Red Cloud, Nebraska, said. <i>Weeds: there.</i></p><p>She can still see the trail of tiny children’s clothing smeared across the driveway from a torn garbage bag, their jolly colors lit intermittently by the lazy loop of spinning red lights atop the Sheriff’s cruiser like a heartbeat, accentuating the indignity and heightening the terror of the moment. There was her nightgown, her winter coat, her favorite blue shirt with the horses on the front that came new from the store and not secondhand and stained from her cousins. And there was her mom, caving to the humiliating counterproductivity of her bellyaching, marching across the lawn, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders, giving her small body a vicious shake, and stuffing her into the car like so much baggage.</p><p><i>Never let them see you cry</i>, her mom had told her through her own antipodean tears as she pulled away. As if an unhoused child needed tips on maintaining a stiff upper lip instead of a reliable parent. </p><p>Although that advice had been effective, probably too effective, and Kim never would cry in front of them again, would never let them see her sweat -- they who came to collect -- no matter how indignantly she had to bear the repercussions of her mother’s actions. Because Kim Wexler had come to know hatred for messy, futile emotions. </p><p>And so she turned back to the rigorous, apathetic institute of school as a place of solace. Head down, chin up, she eked out morsels of academic respect with her fearless submission to instruction. </p><p>Then back at home -- wherever that was this month -- Kim could block out whatever diversion her mother was after that night with her studies. Whether it was the revolving door of boozers from the bar, blasting bad music and smashing beer bottles on the back patio, or the sounds of yet another violent breakup and the disturbing thuds that rattled the walls and shook the jambs, Kim remained ever-unflappable at her improvised workstations in her pursuit of knowledge. Rehearsing the method of turning words and pages into something that might one day equal more than zero. </p><p>Because there was nowhere else to escape to in Red Cloud. Not at age twelve, at least. The wind outside thrashed as much as the cyclone did indoors. Her mother’s chain of follies blazed like a paternoster of intensifying magnesium flares behind her eyes. Her father’s absence sucked like groundwater from the well, depleting the aquifer within her. </p><p>It was better, then, to drown it out, with her music all the way up and a laser focus on the task at hand. Sometimes, if Kim finished her homework before it was quiet again and safe enough to slip to the bathroom or into the kitchen for a hastily foraged meal, she would just do it again and better. And then if there was a pop quiz at school or an exam on the horizon, she would be prepared. And it felt good to be prepared. </p><p>In fact, being prepared became a little bit addicting to a child unmoored. </p><p>So sometimes, she did more. </p><p>Sometimes she grasped feverishly for the reigns of her life. </p><p>Sometimes her mom left her purse on the table when she finally went to bed and sometimes she actually had cash inside. Sometimes a drunk passed out on the couch didn’t notice if someone slid their small hand into their jacket pocket and slipped out a five dollar bill. No one ever grumbled about a pack of cigarettes that wasn’t on the kitchen counter where they left it. She moved like a silent phantom through her mother's mayhem, mending the fray of her life with thin, sticky hands -- a reflection in a television gone to snow. </p><p>It started after she turned thirteen. After she had seen the rare envelope of cash arrive in the mail from her dad. <i>For Rent</i>, it said on the back. But at the end of the month, like horrible clockwork, the money was gone and Kim and her mother spent the rest of the night in a screaming match, driving aimlessly around Webster County until a corrosive, carmine dawn broke on the horizon and they could retreat to the chaotic shelter of Gram’s. Kim’s logical case that this wouldn’t keep happening if Mom just wouldn’t spend all her money on booze was met with the furious and delusional song and dance of a seasoned addict. </p><p><i>The problem is your reaction</i>, her mom loved to accuse. Kim, allegedly, could not understand the stress that came from being a single mother like herself, who equally couldn’t understand her daughter’s scorn for mandatory resilience. </p><p><i>I've never lied to you!</i> Her mother lied, causing Kim to fiercely and crudely try and convince her that an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. And that she didn't need to be protected from the truth.  </p><p><i>Enough with this argument already!</i> Her mom had finally shrieked, <i>Who do you think you are? One of those smartass lawyers from your movies? What’s done is done.</i></p><p>It was an argument she would never win, no matter how stoically and reasonably she approached her mother’s imperfections. No steady job or savings account or perfect daughter would fix the elder Wexler’s problems. Nor by extension, the younger’s. And in the meantime, the actual Wexler that got them into this patronymic mess was long gone, liberated from his family’s corrupted brand.</p><p>That's how Kim knew it was for her mother’s own good when she first started collecting money from her purse whenever she could. <i>Reallocating</i> -- a new word from her vocabulary workbook -- is what she termed it, from whatever fund Mom felt entitled to drink away, set aside for rent. Saved for the next creditor who came knocking.</p><p>It wasn’t even about being the hero or absolving her mother or discharging her father, it was about cucumber-cool survival. No matter how many times she overheard her mother begging and pleading with their landlord for a rent extension, turning on the waterworks, waxing hysterical -- it never worked. There was no plea impressive enough to convince any landlord in Red Cloud that she meant it this time. It was only a matter of time before they tore through every available rental in town like delinquent tornadoes. And then what? Her mother went shrill so Kim went still -- the less emotion she felt about their financial woes, the easier it was to choke them down. And to do what needed to be done.</p><p>So she got bolder. The kids at school would buy tepid cans of beer and the mostly full bottles of vodka and schnapps she swiped from the counter for top dollar. Cigarettes were worth a quarter apiece. They opened their formerly impenetrable circle and invited her to join in on the pleasure. It was a welcome reprieve from the paucity she carried within her. A break from the albatross that normally set them apart. </p><p><i>Never give it away for free, Kimmy,</i> was something her mom also said. It felt good to be in control. </p><p>She had a small stash soon enough, stored in a shoebox with any leftover change from her chores with Gram. But it was tricky to be a fourteen year old with savings and a mother who would spend her last dime on a good time. She needed a better hiding place, safe from a mother who liked to dig through her things and look for stuff to sell. Something she could take with her if they had to leave in the middle of the night again. Under the floorboards was out of the question, too suspicious to be prying those up in a rush, as was opening a bank account, for obvious reasons. </p><p>It was dangerous, too, to be a fourteen year old with savings. Fishy to be in possession of such a large sum of money she had no good excuse for earning. Problematic to be caught in the living room peeking into wallets and pocketing what she found. But there was a gloomy thrill to it, the tiptoeing through the house in the thin crepuscular light, being careful not to disturb the drunken slumberers strewn across or under the furniture, sifting through the debris of their debauchery. There was nothing that could compare to the intoxicating relief that came from a big score or the quickening of her pulse when her mom pulled up to the house in some out-of-towner's fancy sports car. Like a wicked acolyte, a starving Buddha, she could wait all night long, until her eyes were staticky with sleep and longing, for the chance to steal through the house and gather her meager spoils. </p><p>Because the drunk who smashed their full bottle of whiskey on the stones of the patio or the fat cat with the new, shiny car could have their junket and chip in for Kim’s cello too, couldn’t they? She thought herself a good judge of who could afford to contribute and who could not. </p><p>The cello wasn’t exactly her decision anyway. It was a bulky and unaffordable burden, but it was suggested to her without much of a choice. When the truancy officer had caught her behind the field house selling vices, she had given Kim a decision: quit her hustle and join an extracurricular or be exposed as a thief, a Wexler. So she took the deal.</p><p>Although the injunction to join the orchestra was easy to swallow considering the alternative, it was hard to stomach the idea that what she was doing was immoral. It was a matter of survival, not degeneracy, or preference or gratification. And it wasn’t a substitution for the grind, it <i>was</i> the grind, just like pulling the weeds, going to school, and doing her homework. She toiled in pursuit of tipping the scales in her favor, however minute the angle, all in hopes that one day she could rise above the drudgery and deceit and -- even as she worked her fingers to the bone -- prove that it could all be done with her head held high and a secret smile on her face.</p><p>But the only thing her efforts ever brought was endurance, never prosperity. It nourished the substratum where her roots grew, but it never helped her flourish. </p><p>The money out of Mom’s purse partly belonged to her anyway. The money that should have been used to buy food or clothes or a secure future, the money that was instead sloshed down the drain in pursuit of reckless pleasure -- half of that money belonged to Kim. In her mind, it was what she was due. </p><p>For all of her belongings that got left behind each time the landlord changed the locks on them, for the smashed plates she was supposed to eat off of, the lamps with their burned out bulbs that she was supposed to study by. For the broken glass and trash she swept off the patio and for the windows she fitted with cardboard to keep the winter out. For the childhood stolen by addiction -- she wasn't going to give that away for free. She couldn't succumb to idleness.</p><p>Kim hoped that if she moved the pieces around enough, worked those pieces within an inch of their life, eventually, they would all fit together and her impropriety would be absolved and she could quit the slimy habit.</p><p>But in the meanwhile, it was working. If that time of the month rolled around and her mom started to get that nervous hitch to her step, checking coat pockets and wincing into the phone as the bank teller came up with a new way to say zero, Kim could walk out of her bedroom with an envelope in her hand and a lie on her lips about money from Dad and her mom would a smoke-filled sign of relief and snatch it up without thinking twice. And they could settle back into an uneasy peace with each other.</p><p>Like how no one thought twice about how a kid caught selling cigarettes for loose change also had enough money for the deposit for a cello rental. Although the instrument ended up being a worthwhile asset, an integral key to her survival. Simultaneously a shiny new addition to any potential college application -- and a bank.</p><p>A safety deposit box, not for loose change, of course, but the perfect vault for the bigger bills that needed a secure repository, slipped neatly through the f-holes. Something she could keep close by, be possessive of. Something that couldn’t get left behind or sold. Sure, her cello never did sound quite right, muffled and damp and quieter than everyone else's instrument, but the Red Cloud Junior High School orchestra was less about aptitude and more about attendance. Kim and her silent cello barely registered. Most importantly, her money stayed safe. </p><p>And she played Greensleeves on greenbacks.</p><p>---</p><p>When Kim was eighteen, she moved into her boyfriend’s parent's house. That wasn’t her choice either. One month, her mom took the envelope of cash that had magically appeared in the knick of time yet again and gave it to her new boyfriend for his rent instead of theirs. And this time, when it came time to vacate, she took everything with her except Kim. </p><p><i>Don't be mad, Kim,</i>, she had said, the station wagon already shifted into reverse. She wore an exasperated expression like this had been the plan all along and it was Kim's fault for realizing it too late, for not seeing it coming: <i>You know there isn’t room for a little thief like you there</i>. </p><p>And the illusion of security and stability she had abandoned her integrity for winked its taillights at her and then burst into a million pieces.</p><p>Kim stood stunned in the middle of the road as the white-hot fragments of the accusation settled over her like a second skin. <i>She knew.</i></p><p>She knew about Kim's extracurricular activities. She knew the day-saving money didn't come from Dad. She knew that her daughter was struggling to fix her mistakes. She knew that the illicit risks she took were for both of them. She knew that made Kim as rotten as she was. </p><p>And she rejected her anyway.  </p><p><i>A thief.</i> A Wexler. The name rasped like sandpaper on her tongue. The name she gave her, the name she left her.  </p><p>Kim wanted to scream, but no sound came out. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. She wanted to take her cello out of its case and smash it on the ground into a thousand little pieces until the money flew out and blew back to where it belonged. </p><p>Instead, she started walking. If she could have walked straight out of town that night, she would have. If she could have walked straight off the earth that night, she would have. But she might as well have been back on the side of the road picking weeds again, dusted and burnt and fossilized and doomed to watch her hard work be undone over and over again -- Sisyphus in a blond ponytail. This was her punishment, recrystallized by her mother's final act of abandonment. </p><p>Kim and her troubled bones and misguided intentions, dismissed without a second thought, without a modicum of recognition, without concern. The clock had run out on their relationship despite her twisted efforts to keep them together. And one last time, like always, Mom had taken what she needed from her and then cast the rest aside like a trifling box of kitchenware that just didn’t make the cut. </p><p>And it bit like the heels of her shoes into the back of her feet. Cleaved like the strap of her bag into her shoulder. Bruised like cello against her thigh. Stung like the wind in her eyes. Numbed like the October chill on her skin. Burned like the red hot rage that coursed through her veins. Crushed like the weight of knowing she would never be enough.</p><p>---</p><p>That awful night, Kim was forced to make the decision to trade treachery for decency. With each excruciating step across town, she promised herself that she wouldn't sully up this next phase with the same mistakes she had committed for her mother's sake. That era was over whether she liked it or not. She stepped over the threshold into a life that lacked the shrewd independence of life with her mom, but offered a predictability and simplicity she had never experienced. </p><p>Her boyfriend was a dull but easy person who never made a splash not because he didn’t want to, but because he didn’t think to. He grew in a garden planted specifically for him, a shining specimen of midwestern excellence: good looks, a decent family, and a predetermined destiny as the heir to one of Red Cloud’s most reliable enterprises, the gas station. </p><p>He had been one of her steady customers in the days behind the field house, high on warm beer and curiously lingering to see if she wanted to ride bikes by the river or go golfing with his cousins or get drunk after homecoming. She liked him without trusting him, she lost her contest to ignore him anyway. </p><p>And he was boring but sweet in a doltish way, blissfully unaware of her hardships, her struggles, her life. He liked her because she was pretty and serious and left a silent wake. Kim appreciated that he gave her a wide berth to operate in her cagey margins and thanked him with occasions of dutiful attention. Most importantly, he wasn’t concerned with her family’s reputation. Actually, he wasn’t very concerned with her at all, just content to check the box marked <i>Girlfriend</i> on the small town bingo card of his life. Kim eyed the commitments in the next few boxes warily but hoped she had room to maneuver before those eventualities.</p><p>His parents didn’t approve of her, of course. She was a straight-A, second chair, right field salutatorian, but she was still a Wexler -- too trash adjacent for their prince. But they were churchgoing people who pitied her enough to give her a key to the house and a real job at their gas station where she swapped pulling weeds and trading cigarettes for pumping gas and stocking shelves. In return, she got three meals a day and a roof over her head. Kim saw the pity for what it was, an unequivocal humiliation, but she also saw it as an opportunity.</p><p>At a time in her life when possibilities should have been endless, she was actually running out of options. Her juvenile plans to simply take what she needed to survive like some Dickensian street urchin had expired when her mother kicked her out and Red Cloud remained as dreadfully barren of hope as ever. Nothing had really changed since she was nine years old with prairie dirt under her fingernails -- she was still carrying her belongings from one temporary home to another. </p><p>The wind still tore through her. The train from nowhere was still permanently delayed. </p><p>Her boyfriend was thrilled when she moved in, not at all concerned to find her and all her stuff on his doorstep that fateful night and she was happy to pretend that the agony of her mom leaving her behind didn't bother her at all. He took her arrival as a sign that she was ready for bigger commitments. Prom dates and promise rings that would no doubt end in an engagement and the crowning achievement of his life, the two of them running the gas station together: he the manager, she the assistant. </p><p>He opened the door and she walked inside, not because the dream was also hers, but because there was nowhere else to go. He took her silent response to his grand plans as consent and looked the other way when she enrolled in community college after graduation instead of picking up more shifts. She opened the gas station at dawn and pretended she was in it for the long haul. </p><p>It’s true that Kim traded one role for another, moved laterally to a slightly nicer cage in the same damn zoo as before. Her mother asked her to fill shoes that were too big for her. Her boyfriend expected her to fit a mold that was half her size. As always, she thrashed against her restraints, tiptoed around her impulses, nervous to wake the beast.</p><p>Nervous that gig was eventually going to be up and she would be outed for the teenage reprobate, for the Wexler that she was. </p><p>But she was a Wexler and she was sick of being an imposter in her own life. Sick of the lies and the deception. Kim needed to get the fuck out. </p><p>Luckily, her boyfriend’s parents were sloppy business owners -- too faithful -- and the take was always off anyway. They prayed to God to protect their business instead of protecting themselves. And this time, when Kim looked at their nice, cushy life that a missing twenty dollar bill wasn’t going to even touch and when she looked at a town like Red Cloud that would let a drunk mom and an absent father neglect their child for eighteen years and when she looked at herself with her life savings loose inside a cello, she determined that this money was her due too. Once again, Kim decided that she would be the judge of who gave and who took.</p><p>And the slipped bills traveled from the till to her sleeve to her sock to her cello, sitting in the back of her closet like a memorial to her misdeeds. Unassuming. Collecting. Waiting. </p><p>She, too, was mustering. Each hour she spent studying and each course she added to her transcript was another ticket punch to a destination beyond her world of dirt and grass and corn and wind and sky. </p><p>The cello burned wretchedly in the closet, two f-shaped holed searing through the case, past the closet doors, and into her brain. In the years she spent lingering in the cloudy umbrage of her adolescence, her nest egg had grown to an amount that was borderline useful and after five years of tending to it, she had finally launched herself past the point of no return. The brand of her lineage smoldered just under her skin.</p><p>It nearly was time to harvest. It was time to slake the hunger. </p><p>---</p><p>And it was in these final days when Kim understood that she was the weed in the garden of her own life. Inconspicuous and woody, soft-pedalled and unassuming, thrifty and insatiable. Perhaps she might open with a pleasing bloom one day and blossom into a hardy, native wildflower that could thrive in unfavorable conditions -- but a weed nonetheless. </p><p>Unwelcome in the garden. She had been used and uprooted enough times and it finally wasn’t worth getting replanted here. </p><p>And as thoroughly as she would discard an unwanted weed from Gram’s garden, it was time for Kim to remove herself from Red Cloud. </p><p><i>Flowers go here</i>, she thought. <i>And weeds go…</i></p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading!!! I hope it made sense. </p><p>This would not exist without the very loving and very aggressive support of my pals. If you don't like it, blame them. They made me do it! :) &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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